“Quoting” the Film-Noir Femme Fatale in A dama do Cine Shanghai

Abstract

As argued throughout this book, although the femme fatale has been linked to American film noir and neo-noir, she crosses borders, and so do these film genres as they can be found in different contexts with their own specificities. Guilherme de Almeida Prado’s film A dama do Cine Shanghai is the best representation of the neo-noir genre in Brazilian cinema and the only film of that period to directly explore the figure of the neo-noir femme fatale, as American cinema did. Being a neo-noir, this Brazilian film is one more of those films belonging to the genre that make reference to and cite 1940s and 1950s films noirs. However, it depicts themes that are symptomatic of contemporary male anxieties, and this “updates” the genre. Such anxieties are causally connected to the “rebirth” of the femme fatale and her challenge to hegemonic gender and sexual roles, which give the neo-noir films a transnational status: that is, its features are beyond context specificities. A dama do Cine Shanghai exploits film noir’s features and “quotes” other films but mainly Orson Welles’s film noir The Lady from Shanghai (The Lady henceforth). But as I will argue, it nevertheless avoids merely being a “copy” of Welles’s film and film-noir features as it refers to American cinema production only as a way to comment on these and criticize the repeated clichés found in film noir. It portrays a femme fatale who, despite resembling the American ones—especially in her look (unlike the other femmes discussed in this book), is used to reflect on the construction of this character in film noir. KeywordsSexual RolePatriarchal SocietyAmerican CinemaDetective FilmVisual StyleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.